Saturday 31 December 2011

Make Up Your Minds! Part 2579

Daniel Matthews (PhD candidate and sessional lecturer in law at the Birkbeck Law School, University of London) on the iniquities of the bankers:
The task, it seems, is to find the few rotten apples that somehow manage to bring an entire system into disrepute.
Well, since that seems to be the 'Guardian' approach to every social worker scandal that winds up with a dead child and a lot of social workers suddenly looking shifty, why not?
In every case, the figure of the rogue is evoked to apportion blame and ask for forgiveness. It's always just one or two rogue individuals, states or institutions that emerge as the unique source of blame for an entire system's failure. The rogue is blamed but ultimately the system that produces it is forgiven.
Is that sauce you've been serving to the goose suddenly too bitter for the gander?

5 comments:

winston said...

Yes too true. All the banksters either stay in post or move to another bank / political position.
MF Global stole billions yet continues to operate and the US Govt no longer care. It's not democracy it's tyranny.

http://www.financialsense.com/contributors/2011/12/02/ann-barnhardt/interview-transcript

http://www.zerohedge.com/news/why-uk-trail-mf-global-collapse-may-have-apocalyptic-consequences-eurozone-canadian-banks-jeffe

Antisthenes said...

Well he is right the system is dysfunctional. May be it always has been but advances in technology has allowed the exposure of the fact. It appears that humans as a species are also mostly dysfunctional they rarely make the right decision, are unfair, mostly irrational, full of irritating nosy busybodies who would ban breathing to prove their righteousness. Yet somehow against what is to me great odds have flourished and made tremendous leaps forward the question to me is why and how that has happened it never ceases to amaze me.

UK Fred said...

Funny how the Social Workers' Operations Manager's answer to a question about why one of their number had lied to me was that this was a 'rogue' but when I asked what management procedures were in place to pick up such 'rogue' behaviour, that was none of my business. Makes you think.

JuliaM said...

"Yes too true. All the banksters either stay in post or move to another bank / political position."

I wonder where they learned that? Mind you, I'm not directly paying for that, as I am for the civil service.

"... the question to me is why and how that has happened it never ceases to amaze me."

Because, on any given day, there's more of us than there is of them?

"... but when I asked what management procedures were in place to pick up such 'rogue' behaviour, that was none of my business."

No. We just pay for it.

David Gillies said...

The problem is that the modern banking/finance system has all the outward trappings of free market capitalism, but internally is organised like government. In the free market, failure is ruthlessly punished by the destruction of the business concerned. In government, the response to failure is to try more of the same, only harder. Politicians gave the financiers the tools with which to game the system.

As for the financial brouhaha in general, the merchant bankers are a convenient whipping boy but really almost incidental to the whole affair. They may have been naughty boys but they didn't manufacture a sovereign debt crisis, which is where the real disaster is lurking. That was 100% the fault of the politicians and their cronies in central banks.